About the Global Authentic Memory Initiative
The Global Authentic Memory Initiative develops open cryptographic infrastructure to support the long-term authenticity of historical digital records. Operated by Authentic Memory gUG, a registered German non-profit, we work with archives, memorial sites, and media institutions to ensure that humanity's historical record remains reliable in the decades ahead, as synthetic content becomes indistinguishable from authentic recorded material.
Our infrastructure is developed in conversation with partner institutions as well as an academic advisory board that combines political, educational, and technical perspectives.
- Founded
- November 2025
- Based in
- Munich, Germany
- Registration
- HRB 312015 · Amtsgericht München
- Status
- Tax-exempt non-profit · §§ 51 ff. AO
Team
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Pablo Toussaint
Founder & Director
Pablo developed the idea for GAMI in an LMU Munich startup competition in 2025, which the project went on to win. Unwilling to accept that the testimony of people who endured the unimaginable in order to tell their story would become impossible to distinguish from synthetic media, he decided to build the infrastructure to prevent it. As Director, he carries overall responsibility for the initiative and took it from concept to production pilots with a twelve-person team in eight months. He studied geophysics, physics, and philosophy in Munich as a scholar of a German academic scholarship foundation.
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Rosa Bauer
Communications & Impact
Rosa runs GAMI's communications and impact evaluation. She studied Computer Science and Philosophy at LMU Munich and Mathematics and Philosophy at King's College London, as a scholar of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She has worked for an ERC-funded political science group at LMU and for Power for Democracies, an NGO producing the first donor recommendations for strengthening democracy worldwide.
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Florimon Poisson
Co-Founder & Technical Advisor
Florimon co-founded GAMI and advises on its cryptographic architecture. He is completing an M.Sc. in Informatics at LMU Munich, following a B.Sc. in Media Informatics, and with the project that became GAMI he won first place at the LMU startup competition where GAMI began. Before moving into software he danced professionally with the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
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Ritesh Maheshwari
Interim Engineering Lead
Ritesh leads GAMI's engineering. He spent more than fifteen years building large-scale media systems at LinkedIn and Akamai. At LinkedIn he led the Media Platform behind images, video, and live streaming for hundreds of millions of members and was responsible for the platform-wide C2PA integration. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University, with eleven peer-reviewed papers and five patents to his name.
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Sonakshi Chauhan
Operations & Research
Sonakshi runs GAMI's operations and research. She has held research roles at Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, and her work on interpretable AI has been published in leading venues including the Journal of Machine Learning Research and cited more than a hundred times. She holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science and Data Science from the University of Glasgow.
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Michael Rilk
Software Engineer
Michael works on GAMI's core library. He spent seven years in enterprise software engineering at TUI, CANCOM, and on projects for Allianz, from cloud migrations of business-critical systems to the modernisation of decades-old legacy code. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Systems Engineering from TH Cologne.
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Sumit Vekariya
Software Engineer
Sumit builds GAMI's anchoring infrastructure and core library. He has spent eight years in software engineering, five of them specialised in cryptographic infrastructure and decentralised identity, with more than forty-five contributions merged into open-source projects including Ethereum.org, Protocol Labs, Nethermind, and OpenZeppelin. Before GAMI he built TruLens, a zero-knowledge camera app for verifiable media provenance, and won at ETHGlobal New Delhi in 2024.
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Dashiell Fairborn
Standards & Threat Modelling
Dashiell works on GAMI's standards and threat modelling: the question of how the verification architecture holds up against future attacks. He studies Mathematics at Pomona College, where he does research on neural networks in the SPIKE Lab, and has presented his work at the DeepMath Conference and at the International Conference on the Mathematics of Neuroscience and AI in Rome.
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Brandon Lee
Strategy & Development
Brandon works on GAMI's strategy and development, from funding models to how the initiative scales across institutions. He studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton with a minor in Statistics and Machine Learning, and has experience in corporate strategy, data-driven market research, and financial modelling.
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Ella Prisco
Institutional Partnerships & Outreach
Ella works on GAMI's institutional outreach, bringing a historian's perspective to how the initiative speaks with archives and memorial institutions. She studied History at McGill University and has published with ActiveHistory, a platform translating historical scholarship for public audiences. Her background is in research communications and public engagement, including contributions to a public Holocaust Remembrance Day exhibition.
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Emma Yanai
Memory Studies & Editorial Research
Emma leads GAMI's editorial research on memory and remembrance. Her academic work is on postmemory and how societies remember atrocity, questions at the centre of GAMI's mission. A Marshall Scholar, one of 36 Americans selected in her year for fully funded postgraduate study in the UK, she is pursuing an M.Sc. in Intellectual History at Edinburgh and an M.A. in Postcolonial Studies at SOAS. She graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where she received the Emerson Tuttle Cup for the most distinguished scholarly record in her college.
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Francesco Zambonin
Institutional Partnerships & Outreach
Francesco builds GAMI's relationships with institutions across Europe. He holds a PhD in History from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, in cotutelle with the University of Padua, with a thesis on the crime of forgery and false testimony in the Republic of Venice. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure in Paris and of the Scuola Galileiana, an honours college for Italy's highest-achieving students, he held research stays at Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia, has taught at the Sorbonne, and speaks eight languages.
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Academic Advisory Board
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Ali Sunyaev
Vice President & Professor of Information Infrastructures · TU Munich
Ali Sunyaev is Professor of Information Infrastructures at TU Munich, Vice President for the TUM Campus Heilbronn, and a member of TUM's Board of Management. His research is on reliable, decentralised information systems for critical infrastructures, including blockchain-based integrity verification, the auditing and certification of IT systems, and trustworthy AI. Before joining TUM he held a chair at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
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Jacob N. Shapiro
John Foster Dulles Professor of International Affairs · Princeton University
Jacob N. Shapiro is the John Foster Dulles Professor of International Affairs at Princeton and co-founder of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university effort to study political violence with data. His research spans conflict, security policy, and the integrity of the information environment, including large-scale work on misinformation. He is the author of The Terrorist's Dilemma and co-author of Small Wars, Big Data.
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Anja Ballis
Professor for Holocaust Education · LMU Munich
Anja Ballis is Professor for Holocaust Education at LMU Munich, where she has worked for more than twenty years on memorial pedagogy and the digital future of remembrance. She created LediZ, which records interactive 3-D testimonies of Holocaust survivors so that visitors can ask their own questions and receive answers drawn from thousands of filmed responses, keeping first-person memory accessible beyond the lifetimes of those who lived it.
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Antonia Wachter-Zeh
Professor for Coding and Cryptography · TU Munich
Antonia Wachter-Zeh heads the Coding and Cryptography group at TU Munich. Her research spans coding theory, information theory, and post-quantum cryptography, the mathematics that keeps verification secure even against future quantum computers and the foundation of GAMI's long-term resilience. She holds an ERC Starting Grant and the DFG Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, one of Germany's most important awards for early-career researchers.
Governance & Ethics
Mission-locked
Authentic Memory gUG recognised as a non-profit under German law, legally bound to its mission under §§ 51 ff. AO, which includes a statutory asset lock (§ 61 AO), and a selflessness requirement (§ 55 AO) that prohibits using organisational resources for private benefit.
No commercial dependencies
We are funded by public grants, foundations, and institutional partnerships. We do not sell access to data, and we do not have investors holding profit expectations. There is no incentive for our priorities to shift away from the institutions we serve.
Open by default
The verification toolchain, proof-record format, and integration code are designed to be released as open source under permissive licences. The index is mirrorable; verification can be performed without any dependency on us, including offline.
Hashes only
Original files never leave the institution. We only store cryptographic fingerprints computed locally through a one-way mathematical function, from which no information about the underlying material can be extracted.
Institution-held keys
The cryptographic key that signs an institution's proofs remains entirely with the institution. We never hold it. No central authority, including us, can produce a valid proof on behalf of a partner.
Designed to outlast us
Verification rests on published standards and a public, distributed ledger, not on the continued existence of GAMI. Existing proofs remain valid even if we cease operating.
Multi-stakeholder governance
Currently overseen by a non-profit executive structure with an academic advisory board. As GAMI grows, we intend to expand into a multi-stakeholder model that draws in memory institutions, academic representatives, and civil-society stewards, so that the infrastructure is governed by the communities whose collections it protects.
Where We Stand
A short, honest account of where the project currently stands, what is operational, and what is on the horizon.
Foundation
Architecture, mission-lock and incorporation
Grounded in extensive collaboration with leading scholars and memory institutions, we defined an architecture that addresses real institutional needs, built the core cryptographic modules to implement it, and formally incorporated Authentic Memory as a non-profit.
First Pilots
Anchoring real institutional collections
With the foundation in place, we are now running the first live integrations with our institutional partners, testing the pipeline against real archival collections and refining our operations for broader use.
Open Infrastructure & Long-Term Governance
Public verifier, open source, and international scale
The goal is a truly public infrastructure: an open toolchain, a mirrorable index, and a public verification interface woven into the archival and provenance ecosystems where the world's most important collections live. Governed by the institutions, researchers, and civil-society stewards who depend on it, we are creating the infrastructure humanity's historical record can rest on.